


triptych (like a vision from an old west wind)

by therethedanceis



Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:15:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28322223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therethedanceis/pseuds/therethedanceis
Summary: It was almost predestined, for her to fall at least a little in love with him. / She’s only ever wanted the world for both of them, these two pieces of her heart. / If he’d been thinking, he would’ve realized just how in danger he was of falling in love with her.
Relationships: Amy March & Josephine March, Theodore Laurence & Josephine March, Theodore Laurence/Amy March
Comments: 34
Kudos: 173
Collections: amy





	triptych (like a vision from an old west wind)

* * *

**february** —

He’s draped across her sheets like he owns the damn bed, looking at her through half-lidded eyes and altogether too much satisfaction on his face. His hair’s a mess of curls she could spend the entire afternoon playing with and he’s absently twirling a heavy silver lighter between deft fingers. Fingers that have, by now, explored every inch of her and lit her very skin on fire.

She can’t quite believe she’s ended up here, in a tiny flat in the _sixième_ with bright flowers in the window boxes and Theodore Laurence naked in her bed, watching her with unabashed want. 

It sends a flush down her chest. 

If twelve-year-old Amy could see her now, could see what that adolescent crush would become, she’d have been scandalized and so secretly triumphant. 

Twenty-two-year-old Amy is less victorious and less pleased, because the weight of growing up has taught her that her victories aren’t without their consequences. The fickleness of life has banished the fantasies of her childhood into only the far corners of her mind. 

She’s too old now to believe this ends well.

Really, she knows that there’s no way this ends well. She’s known it from the start.

But she can’t bring herself to care. Not when her sheets smell like him, his t-shirts are thrown haphazardly among her own jeans and dresses, the warmth of his arms around her feels like home in this faraway place, and she can almost taste love in the drift of his fingers down her spine. 

It’s never been a secret that she had a crush on him as a girl, her older sister’s best friend, who was also the cute boy next door. It was almost predestined, a story she’d seen told over and over again in the movies that took over her imagination, for her to fall at least a little in love with him. Everything she knew told her it was expected that she would. Except, everything she knew also told her the younger sisters never ended up with the boy, did they? She’d known that at five and thirteen. She sure as hell should know that now. 

But she can’t bring herself to care. 

The snick of his lighter draws her attention back. Without looking at him, she shrugs on a shirt that’s too large for her. 

“I really wish you wouldn’t.”

He doesn’t say a thing, but she can smell the smoke and tobacco start to permeate her small bedroom anyway. She opens a window and thinks it’s really quite French of them. 

“What would Jo say?”

“I don’t give a fuck what Jo has to say,” he responds after a while, casual. 

Amy turns to him then, a sad sort of look in her eyes. She wants to ask, wants to comfort, but doesn’t have the right thing to say and so doesn’t say a thing about it at all. 

“When are you going back to London?”

He smirks at her, his sour mood at the reminder of Jo dissipating quickly. “Sick of me already?”

She isn’t. (She won’t ever be.)

“Laurie…” she insists. “It’s been two months. Not that I don’t love having you here, but, what are you doing?”

“Looking at you.” He gives her one of his impish half smiles. “You really are beautiful, Amy.”

The sudden earnestness in his voice makes her want to cry, just a little. Instead, she rolls her eyes, as casual as can be, and walks up next to him to take the cigarette from his hand. She thinks he might expect her to put it out, but she likes to be a surprise and puts it in her own mouth instead. She takes a long drag and meets his eyes when she exhales. “I’m serious, Laurie.”

“So’m I.” He’s got a light hand on her hip, drawing her down and pulling her closer. 

“Laurie.”

“Amy,” he murmurs against the hollow of her clavicle, lacking any of her insistence while pressing light kisses against the jut of bone.

“Don’t you realize how lucky you are?” 

“Every day,” he manages to say between the kisses he’s trailing up her jaw. 

“Stop being charming.” She pulls away. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

He closes the distance she created, saying into her lips, “No talking,” and capturing them in a soft and sweet kiss. 

She lets him continue for a little while and almost gives him his way, almost lets him slip his hand up her shirt and turn the kiss into something more heated and needing, but she hasn’t been called willful all her life for nothing. 

“I was doing some of my best work, you know,” he sighs. But he leans back against her pillows and drops the hand that had been drawing circles at her waist. “Tell me more, Saint Amy.” He looks as comfortable as ever, but the slight narrowing of his eyes belies any lightheartedness in his tone. 

She means it mostly as a joke, but can’t help the truth in her voice when she says, “I really do despise you sometimes.” She takes the droll raise of his eyebrow as an invitation to continue. “You have every door open to you in the world—you’re healthy, you’re intelligent, even if you don’t act it, you’re attractive—”

“—You think I’m beautiful, too!”

She ignores him. “You could do anything you wanted with your life. Why are you so content to just waste it away?”

“Not every door.” There’s a stormcloud behind his eyes, dissipating just as quickly as it came. 

But it makes her soften anyway, just a little. “I’m sorry about Jo. Really, I am.”

He rolls his eyes and tries to pull her against him once again. “You make me sound really fucking pathetic. For the record, I’m over Jo.” His hands are searching out the hem of her shirt. “And I really don’t want to talk about this anymore.” 

“Well tough shit, Ted.” She sits up and scoots further back away from him. “Do you have any idea how selfish you’re being? You can’t just sleep and drink your way through life, Laurie. You’re too smart and too talented for that.” She tilts her head and considers him. “If you won’t do it for yourself, you should at least try for your grandfather.” 

He scoffs. “I’m not going to take career or life advice from the girl who’s about to sell her heart and soul—not to mention four full years of art school in Paris—to become a _lawyer_.” He spits the last word as if it’s poison. 

“You know why I’m—”

“—I really don’t get it, Amy! You have so much talent! You should be pursuing your dreams!”

“—It’s not that easy! I—”

“—Why aren’t you fighting for—”

“—have other things to think about—”

“—your art? You could be so great—”

“—I’m not Jo!” she bursts out, finding the one thing she knows will shut him up. It’s an old fight they’re having, boiled down to its essence now. But still, she’s standing, with her hands at her hips and feeling all sorts of wild and indignant. “I’m not as good or as strong as she is. I’m not going to delude myself into wasting time on something that isn’t ever going to go anywhere.” He looks like he’s about to interrupt and she charges forward before he can interject, parrying the argument she’s sure he was about to make. “I can paint you a portrait, but there’s a thousand other art students who can do it even better than I can.” 

She’s pacing back and forth the nine feet of her bedroom, enumerating the reasons for his benefit as much as her own. “Beth’s sick, Laurie, and insurance can only do so much. Meg’s got the twins and John’s student loans and their mortgage to think about. And Jo’s such a good writer. She _can’t_ give that up. We can’t let her. Mom and dad are doing their best, but they’ll be retiring soon. And then what?” She’s looking at him, imploring him to understand her, to not push her on this anymore. 

She and her sisters have always been ones for big dreams—chasing those castles in the sky farther than they could reach. As a child, she’d imagined fame and glory, to be the _doyenne_ of a great _salon_ , dripping in diamonds as big as her head, with a grand house filled with all the dresses she could ever want, portraits from the masters, and a handsome husband who pampered and cherished her. 

But those were the dreams of a little girl who wanted a world bigger than her own and understood little of the truth that life would bring.

In its hardships and its joys, the life she faces is true and honest. And so she has had to be true and honest with herself. So much of her wants nothing more than to paint and be feted as a modern genius, but Amy knows that won’t be her fate. She has talent and skill, but falls far short of genius. 

She decided long ago she’d be great, or nothing—so she’ll be nothing. 

It was an easy decision. 

But the world faults those who give up on their dreams, finding in them some lack of character or virtue, and in the face of Jo’s disappointed, Meg’s understanding, and Marmee’s sad eyes, she’s not so strong as she pretends to be. And in the face of Laurie’s indignance, she almost breaks.

“I can’t help my family if I’m struggling to make ends meet.” The _too_ , she leaves unspoken. “Aunt Josephine has offered to pay for law school. I can graduate in three years, make good money during the summers, and get a great job right after.”

“Amy,” he sounds so desperate, pleading for dreams of hers that she’s already locked away in a box. “You’ll _hate_ it.” 

“It’s my _family_ .” She is begging him to understand. To stop pushing. To see, understand, _know_ why she’s doing this, and know it’s not a shame. 

He deflates in front of her, breathing in deeply before looking at her with sad eyes. “Yeah, okay.” 

He stands and draws her into a close hug, arms tight around her back. When he whispers kisses to the top of her head, she thinks she can hear him tell her that she is good and that she is strong. 

For that moment, Amy allows herself to know she isn’t.

———

He’s always had Romantic notions of Paris. In his mind, it has been the place he would lose himself in art and creation, where he could wander and think and be without any consequence. He has always had big ideas for the time he would spend in Paris, imagined the scripts he would write, the people he would meet, and the hours he would spend just existing. 

But, over the course of the last couple of months, it’s the tangible Paris that he’s grown to appreciate most. The small habits that have become rote between him and Amy that mean even more now than any imagined tableaux.

There is, for example, the tiny brasserie down the street from her flat, where they go get cheese and charcuterie and too many glasses of cheap Cabernet and, despite the fight they just had, everything feels almost okay again. 

The last cord of tension strung between them breaks in the moment that she aims a cornichon at his forehead, misses, and hits the particularly severe-looking man behind them instead. Amy’s eyes widen in momentary shock before she descends into laughter, choking on syllables of “très désolée” that sound rather hollow between the fits of her giggles. He can’t help the grin on his face as she tries to gather herself, and thinks he would be content to live like this forever. 

The smile remains as he listens to her muse about the trip she’s planning for this summer—her last European hurrah before she returns to the States and he agrees to show her Italy, promises to take her through the streets his mother explored as a girl and he conquered as a boy. 

The map of all the places he wants to show her is drawing itself in his mind as she quiets, a somber and serious expression crossing her face. 

Her fingers fiddle with the last bites of baguette on her plate. 

“Beth wouldn’t want you to put your life on hold, Amy.”

“I should be home, though.” She lifts her eyes to him, chin still tucked into her chest. “Jo’s there. And she would never let me hear the end of it if I was traipsing through Europe while they’re all there, while Beth is…” Amy says it more to herself than anything else. 

What she can’t say out loud haunts them both. _Europe will always be there, but Beth…_

In that moment, Amy’s heartbroken face not meeting his gaze, he wants to say a million unkind things about Jo March and her righteousness. He keeps quiet, but thinks them all anyway. Jo is good and decent, yes, but at what cost? There’s a wild world out there Jo has always dreamt of, but instead of embracing it like her youngest sister, she holds moral rectitude in her arms and faults Amy as selfish for taking advantage of the opportunities offered to her. Jo is idealistic and expectant, but leaves no room for anyone—especially not Amy, at once too similar and too different from herself, with whom she’s butted heads since before he ever knew them—to be imperfect without facing her judgment. 

“It doesn’t matter what Jo thinks.”

She raises an eyebrow. _Really?_ The motion says. _You’re really going to tell me you don’t care what Jo thinks?_

He doesn’t. Not much. Not anymore. 

Because it’s Amy, isn’t it? Because, somewhere along the way, disappointing Amy March became the untenable thing.

How or when that happened, he couldn’t really say. 

From day one, he’s loved all of the March sisters like they were his own, but he was always Jo’s— _Jo’s_ next door neighbor, _Jo’s_ best friend, _Jo’s_ Teddy.

He’d thought he always would be.

He never expected to find Amy. 

He certainly never expected to start sleeping with Amy. If Mrs. March had made him swear on any number of Bibles or if Jo had threatened him with the pain of a thousand tiny needles against his pinky toe, he’d be able to say truthfully that he really hadn’t planned it. Because, if Laurie had given it even two seconds of thought, nothing would ever have happened. 

But she’d been grinning up at him with a mischievous glint in her eye, her hair up in a loose knot and a streak of blue paint on her cheekbone. She’d looked young and sweet and beautiful and so grown up and all he’d wanted to do was kiss her. 

So he did.

She was an absolute revelation, soft and warm beneath his touch, looping her arms around his neck and leaning into his touch. 

Everything and absolutely nothing like Jo. 

When she didn’t stop him and when she let him unbutton her jeans and when she palmed him through his own, he hadn’t been thinking. 

He definitely hadn’t been thinking when he kissed her in the middle of the Tate and then again at every red light while they walked down Bond Street, to the chagrin of many passersby, or when he booked a ticket back to Paris with her or when he’d made himself at home in her bed. 

He hadn’t been thinking at all, because if he had, he would’ve realized just how in danger he was of falling in love with Amy March. 

He hadn’t been thinking, so one day, he woke up and he simply was. 

Laurie doesn’t know what to do with that. 

They’re _casual_ after all, just like she and Fred Vaughn had been casual, and he knows very clearly what became of that. 

So he tucks the knowledge away and Amy under his arm. 

It’s dark out by the time they finish their dinner and the street lights are glittering against the banks of the Seine. Amy is flushed and warm against him, leaning into his shoulder like she belongs there. This Amy is his favorite—the sweet, uninhibited one, who forgets that she’s supposed to keep her distance from him. This version of Amy melts into him when he wraps his arm around her waist and tucks his ungloved hand into the pocket of her coat. When he stops them in the middle of the sidewalk and pulls her against him into a lingering kiss, this Amy just sighs softly into his mouth. 

This Amy doesn’t remember that he’s Jo’s, doesn’t let that Jo-shaped gulf, full with reasons to be cautious, hold her at arm’s length from him.

He gets it. He really does. Barely a year ago, he was declaring his love for her sister, basically begging Jo to give him a chance at forever. To now turn around and declare the same feelings for Amy? He knows how it would look, how it would feel—even if appearances are the farthest from the truth. 

He understands now that Jo was right—they would’ve been a disaster. The more time he spends with Amy, who fits so well into the curves of his life, the more he realizes Jo never would have. 

In the last few weeks, more than any yelling or imploring or disappointed words, more than his grandfather or even the ghost of Jo’s judgment, it’s been Amy’s steadfast dedication to her family that has begun to convince him he needs to grow up. By the time she’d told him about her law school plans, Amy had already taken the LSAT, applied, and been accepted. Even as she’d lived as a _bonne vivante_ , she’d been shouldering the weight of her future. 

They make it back to her apartment but, for once, he doesn’t follow her up the thin, creaking staircase. She looks pensive when he brushes _bises_ to her cheeks, but doesn’t say a word, letting him turn on his heel in silence. 

He books the ticket to London on his walk back to his hotel. 

Because Amy is right. 

Much as he wishes he could, he can’t actually spend the rest of his days camped out in Amy and Florence’s apartment or driving a vintage car through Tuscany or even in the lush hotel room he’s been paying for to keep up appearances of propriety. It’s sweet and comfortable, this little sojourn from the responsibilities of his life, but something like shame is beginning to bite at his craw and he can’t stand the growing guilt for any longer than he has to. 

He packs up his suitcases without a hint to Amy, leaving behind dozens of t-shirts and sweaters around her apartment instead of asking for them back. They look better on her anyway.

And instead of prolonging any goodbyes, he sends her a photo of the airport when he’s at his gate and she responds with three heart emojis and nothing else for months while he sits in the glass box of his grandfather’s firm’s office, trying not to give into the impulse that wants to buy a one-way ticket back to Paris. 

He types a dozen or more texts only to delete them all. His stray observations about London financiers and pubs and fish and chips all seem too blithe for how they left things. And the things he really wants to tell her—for those, he doesn’t know what words to use. 

So he settles into the quiet.

And when his phone rings with his first message from Jo in almost a year, it’s a deafening silence that descends instead. 

She says just two words.

“It’s time.”

———

 **may** —

The Concord, Massachusetts that welcomes Amy and Teddy home is warm and sunny—brighter than it has any right to be, shining on despite the gravity that has settled over the March family home.

Jo hasn’t seen her youngest sister since Christmas and hasn’t really spoken to Laurie in almost a year. 

She half expects strangers to be coming home. 

But the two people who fall out of the Uber Black are just the same as she remembers them: haloed and foppish, respectively, looking tired and weary, but so very much like them.

The relief she feels when they clamber, bags in hand, through the front door is overwhelming. Amy’s hair is in two braids down her back and Laurie’s is as mussed as it has always been. Meg is right beside her, pulling Amy into a hug, and there’s only a second’s pause before she pitches herself into Laurie’s open arms. It’s all she can do not to cry when his arms pull tight. 

“Oh, Teddy,” she breathes, releasing a year’s worth of remorse and regret in that quiet breath of air. 

“I know,” he replies, tucking her head under his chin. “We’re home.” 

They’re home and her heart feels lighter now. 

With his grandfather still in London and everything happening in their home, it’s decided, mostly by Jo, that Laurie should stay with them. Since the big old house is empty right now, and he’s not due to go back to work for weeks, and would just be coming over every day for meals anyway, Jo reasons, it makes more sense this way. “I’ve been staying up in the attic,” she shrugs, “But it would be easy enough to move back downstairs if you want to take the futon up there.” 

“Yeah, sounds good, Jo,” Laurie says at last, shifting his gaze around the room before finally settling back to meet her eyes, a small smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. “I remember that old futon being pretty comfortable.”

And so it is.

Laurie settles into their attic—the March girls’ whole world and beyond for two decades—and Jo shares a room with Amy, which was only ever attempted for a week when they were younger, before the arguments devolved into a stream of constant fighting that outweighed any lessons in sharing and understanding Margaret and Robert March hoped to teach their tenacious daughters. The girls are women now, though, and have long since learned compromise. Or else that silence can be just as cutting as a pinch. 

They still squabble, of course, when she plucks the last piece of bacon from the table or Amy takes too long in the bathroom, but in even that, Jo feels relief. What lies underneath is normalcy—that no matter what may come, this home is a beating heart. And when she catches Marmee’s soft, serene smile at the chaos, Jo knows this is right.

As Beth watches on happily and tiredly from the couch, the house thrums. Amy regales them with stories of Paris and London and beyond, which twists in Jo only slightly now. When Laurie chimes in with a correction to Amy’s story and she curses at him _en français_ and he parries back with the same, this, too, feels right. Her worldly duo, back home. 

She and Amy have been foils since youth, with desires similar in letter if not in spirit. Dreaming for castles in the sky, one reaching for what the world should be and the other for what the world could do. But Amy’s spirit is the charming, assiduous one, while Jo acts in broader and bolder strokes, and that difference has smoothed her younger sister’s way through life. 

There had been a time when Jo would have said that Amy stole Europe from under her nose, but it would have been unkind then and is untrue now. 

After all, but for a quick, sharp, and relentless wit that piqued Aunt Josephine, it was Jo who would have been at the Sorbonne, losing herself in Parisian nooks, and finding the world in its bustle and its hidden corners. Harvard is no small consolation prize, but still, she dreams of the croissants and conversation that might have been. 

Jo has envy of it all, as she always will for anyone’s adventures, but Amy looks like radiance personified, grown up and at ease, and Jo can be glad of her sister’s joy now and knows it does not—has never—come at the expense of her own.

There is joy enough, expanding and expanding into limitlessness, for them all. 

Just as their shared sorrow is a gulf whose end does not come.

They’re strong, this family of hers, and especially Beth, who fights quietly and no less valiantly for it. But Beth is not well, and that has been true for a while. Ten years earlier, Jo and her iron will met with God’s and came out the victor. She has no reason to believe otherwise now. 

But, of course, life spoils as much as it savors, and the news Beth shares—resolutely, strong and sure, her grace a quiet one—just weeks after Teddy and Amy come home, is the worst of all blows.

Teddy has her hands gripped in his, a comforting and familiar warmth around her own fingers, which are cold from the chill Beth’s and her parents’ quiet, steady, sad voices have sent through her. Their solemn expressions dappled in the evening light—they will haunt her for the rest of her days.

His hands dwarf hers. They have since she was fifteen. But they feel different today. 

Beth is dying and everything feels different today.

Laurie and Amy have been home for almost a month, but Beth is still dying, and everything is different. 

She doesn’t know why she thought them coming home would fix this, except that she and Laurie have always managed to figure _something_ out that could set her world back to rights and Amy has always been so obstinate about getting her way that Jo didn’t think there was anything that could stand in her way. 

But he’s looking at her with sad, heavy eyes that offer nothing more than comfort when she needs solutions and Amy has taken on such a serious way about her, at once so stoic and still and resigned. 

They seem strangers to her.

It’s all Jo can do not to burst out of her skin. 

“Just… go away, Laurie.” 

She thinks, if she’d been loud and brash, he would’ve fought her, but she’s tired and her words are weary, so he turns and leaves through the back door, leaving her alone in the kitchen. As soon as the room is empty, she wishes she hadn’t asked him to go. It’s so much worse to be alone.

She almost calls out to him, almost asks him back, almost apologizes, almost—

But Amy is out there. 

She can hear the low murmurs of their conversation. From where she stands, Jo can just see both of them, Laurie’s arms around Amy’s shaking shoulders, her head tucked under his chin. It’s an intimate scene. 

Jo looks away.

She knows they were together in Europe, more often than the pure obligation of family friendship would require. He would pop up in the corners of Amy’s Instagram stories occasionally, a foppish head of curls, an impish grin, a playful wink. Jo was always happy to spot him. 

It had been a comfort to know they were friends. To know they had each other while the rest of them were home.

But she has never considered what it would mean that they had a friendship that wasn’t relative to her, one that was just their own, in which she would have no part. Through the window, it bites, just a little. 

From the moment they met, Jo and her Teddy were two halves of a whole. A binary star coming into being. Two objects caught in an endless, irresistible pull, so much the same that their movements were effortlessly mirrored in the other. She always knew what his next move would be. She could always anticipate the quirk of his head or a loud guffaw. She always noticed a change in the air when he was close by. She would always react accordingly.

So she’s surprised she hadn’t noticed it earlier, how close Amy and Teddy have gotten. Or maybe she had, and just hadn’t recognized it among the grief and exhaustion and fear that have been her constants. 

They’ve been playing off of each other well, Amy and Teddy, but then again, they always have. There’d been more than one occasion in their youth when one or the other’s date had gotten touchy about their repartee. She’d always chalked it up to them being unrelenting flirts, the both of them, able to pick up easy conversation with anyone and leave them charmed. 

But that too is, now, different. 

But, then again, nothing stays. 

The world has always had a way of spinning on, even if she hasn’t been paying attention. 

* * *

**june** —

The sun had been low in the sky when she arrived at the airport, a backpack on her shoulders, all her things in boxes to follow, and twin aches in her head and heart. In Paris, she left behind plans for a carefree summer and a full bloom of magnolias and peonies bursting in a tiny, sun-soaked kitchen. 

They arrived home just as the hydrangeas in the yard were exploding into full color, her favorite sign of a beautiful summer to come. This year, it had struck her as a horrible lie. 

A chapter closed. 

And in Concord, another one open before her that she doesn’t know how to write. Stories were always Jo’s job. 

Despite everything, coming home is fitting within a group of people so instinctually, so naturally, that she doesn't have to think about belonging at all. She takes comfort in this.

But things have changed since she last lived at home. Meg is married now and has her own home a ten minute drive away with her husband and children. Her parents, still lively, are older than she ever remembers them being. Jo’s edges seem sharper and harder, honed from years in New York. Beth is kind as she always has been and will be, but meets her future with grace and eyes wide open. And Amy—she doesn’t think any of them expected her to come home changed, and maybe she hasn’t, by their renderings, but she’s grown up too. Carries her new shades and shadows with poise.

But as much as any one of them has changed individually, and no matter who leaves or joins, the fact of her family stays constant. And she is glad for that, glad she has this home to return to and carry with her wherever she goes.

It’s a comfort to fall into familiar patterns. 

Jo captures most of Laurie’s attention, the two of them up to their old antics almost immediately. Amy’s still not sure what exactly happened between her sister and Laurie—he never talks about it and she’s never asked—but she can hazard a guess, based on what she knows of the two of them and just how reluctant they’ve both been to ever mention it. But whatever it was seems to work itself out in their first few days home and, though there is decidedly less romping about in the woods now than when they were children, there doesn’t seem to be any unease between the two of them now.

She and Laurie never discussed what coming home would mean for them, but she thinks they reached a mutual decision: Not under Margaret Curtis March’s roof. 

In any case, with three sisters, two parents, a niece, a nephew, and a smattering of fostered kittens around, they’re rarely alone. 

But she can feel his eyes on her when Jo’s caught up in her own whirlwind and not paying enough attention. The cautious, comforting eyes, trying to decide if she’s okay.

She’s not. She’s really not. She feels useless and helpless here, like nothing she can do would be enough. But she sits with Beth in the afternoons and entertains her sister with stories of Paris and London, detailing the croissants she ate, the concerts she heard, the museums she lost herself in. 

When Beth asks about boys with a bright glint of mischief in her eyes, she thinks for a split second about lying or telling only a partial truth. No one at home knows this tiny, quiet thing about her, and she has her reasons for keeping it so.

It slips out more easily than she anticipates. 

“I’ve been sleeping with Laurie.” She says the words soberly, not at all confessional, between episodes of _Bake Off._

It surprises her that Beth is the one she tells first. 

Beth. Kind, quiet Beth. Of all her sisters, Amy was always closest with Meg, who understood her desires and impulses best when they were younger, and most at odds with Jo, who could not begin to understand Amy’s desires and impulses if she tried. She and Beth had only been a pair by virtue of being the younger sisters, always so different, Amy always charging forward and upward into something more, something better, and Beth so content in a world of her own creation. 

Beth has never been whom Amy thought she needed.

But she needs a big sister more than anything right now and Beth is her big sister, too. Maybe she knows Beth would understand. Because isn’t Beth also familiar with longing for things that couldn’t be hers?

Beth looks at her thoughtfully, giving away no sign of what she’s thinking as she sets her knitting needles down in her lap and pauses the TV.

“Not since coming home,” Amy continues, picking at the corner of an old throw pillow. “But while we were in Europe. You know how I did that exchange at Central Saint Martins last semester? He came to a party at Fred Vaughn’s while I was in London and it kind of started then. And then he came to Paris for a while.” The entire story spills out of her, like a dam finally bursting.

She tells Beth everything—from seeing Laurie for the first time at the Vaughns’ to ditching Fred at his own party to go get burgers with Laurie and laughing until well into the early morning. How hanging out with Laurie had gone from two old friends spending time with each other to then spending more and more time with him to something even more than that. She tells Beth of being kissed in a room of Rothkos at the Tate, the surprise behind Laurie buying a last minute ticket to Paris, attempting to make croissants in her tiny kitchen, the fights they’ve had about law school and the future. How, somewhere along the way, even if he didn’t think of her like that, she started considering him her best friend.

It feels good to have it out—not in the open, but also not just in her own mind to turn over and over like some dirty secret. Or worse yet: like a dream slipping away from her.

When she finishes, Beth doesn’t say anything. “He just… Is it crazy that I miss it?” She looks up. “Don’t get me wrong, Beth. I love being home and being here with you, but… everything is different at home. We’re all so different.”

She hadn’t thought she would miss him so much. Would miss being able to tease him in the way she had grown accustomed to, to share jokes between the two of them, to catch his eye and know he’s thinking the exact same thing she is. She longs for the casual, irreverent intimacy they shared back in Paris—the ability to tuck herself under his arm, to let him touch her like it’s the most natural thing of all, and to kiss him—oh to kiss him. At home, with a Jo who knows nothing about what transpired between her youngest sister and her Teddy, Amy and Laurie are left to tread lightly, polite and too distant, as though they don’t know every inch of each other, dancing around one another like the strangers they aren’t. It’s worse even than the three months between his leaving Paris and their coming home. At least then, that forced silence felt like _something_. Here, at home—

“Laurie is Jo’s,” Beth supplies, gimlet-eyed and matter of fact.

“Yeah,” Amy breathes. “Laurie is Jo’s. And I’m Amy, who was only ever a pest. But it’s not just that. It’s—” She pauses, considers. “We were supposed to go to Italy together. He was going to show me where he grew up and the places his parents would take him when he was a kid. He was going to try and convince me pistachio is a remotely acceptable gelato flavor.” She can’t help the smile when she thinks of it. “We had plans and… An entire… context, I guess, in Europe. Since coming home, it’s like none of that ever existed.” Because Laurie is Jo’s and less than a year pales in comparison to an entire lifetime. 

“It existed,” Beth affirms, reaching for Amy’s hand. Quietly, she wonders, asking the question Amy has been afraid of, “Ames, do you love him?”

“I don’t know,” Amy responds finally. She really doesn’t. She doesn’t know how to separate Europe Amy from Concord Amy or Europe Laurie from Concord Laurie. And she doesn’t know how to fit them all together, either. “It’s Laurie. I think I’ve always loved him.”

“You should talk to him, Ames. Maybe he’s feeling the same way.” 

Amy doesn’t answer. She doubts it. 

“Well,” Beth begins. Then, she stops. “What’s he like? Is he…” her voice trails off, but the euphemism is written in the sly grin on her face. Her index fingers are nearly touching, but then she’s inching them apart while staring at Amy. “Tell me when.” 

“Elizabeth March!” Amy shrieks, scandalized, when she catches on, and hits her sister lightly with a throw pillow. “You minx!”

“Oh come on!” laughs Beth. “You can’t blame a girl for wondering! He’s hot. Even Meg thought so. I think the only one of us who _didn’t_ have a crush on Laurie at some point was Jo. So come on. Spill. For the good of the sisterhood.”

She doesn’t dignify the question with a response, but does let Beth keep teasing her until they’re each a heap of giggles, spurred back on again twenty minutes later when Jo and Laurie walk through the door laden with groceries.

It feels good to laugh.

———

Sundays are just the same as they’ve always been. Church in the morning, even though none of them believes in God anymore, and then the ten of them seated around the worn oak table groaning under the weight of decades of brunches and art projects, before someone pulls out the red and green box that’s seen better days. It is the stability and unadulterated joy of family he longed for even when his parents were alive and so much more when they weren’t. 

No matter what happened or could ever happen between them, Laurie will be indebted to Jo for all his days for giving him her family. 

The rest of the Marches are moving through a game of Apples to Apples—loudly—in the living room and Beth has just won another round when Jo drops her voice low, the two of them in the kitchen slicing cheese and arranging charcuterie. 

“Teddy, I think if you asked me again, I’d say yes.” She says the words contemplatively, as though turning the thought over in her head for the first time. It’s not quite an invitation, but it’s not not one either.

The declaration comes by way of nothing and shocks him just a little. A year ago, he would have been jumping for joy to hear her say this. Even just six months ago, this would’ve answered the very prayer on his lips, if he were the praying type. But so much can change in six months, and the confession just makes him sad now. For him and her and the ghosts of the children they used to be. 

“That’s the sadness talking, Jo.” 

“No, honestly!” Her voice becomes more insistent, more desperate. “I’ve missed you. I can’t bear not having you in my life.” When he turns his head, she’s looking at him with wildness in her eyes. “Ask me again!”

In the month and a half since he and Amy have been home, he and Jo have been able to find a new normal between them. It’s not quite like before—they will never be those kids again—but the air between them is lighter and easier than it’s been in a long time. 

He thought they’d both put it behind them.

“You’ll always have me in your life, Jo. I swear it.” He keeps his voice quiet and steady. “But you don’t want to be with me and I can’t—I can’t be with you.”

“Sure you can! We could—”

“—We’d kill each other, Jo,” he says with a small smile. “You would hate me and it wouldn’t work.” 

He leaves other things unsaid, unturned yet in his own mind. They start to take shape like, _I would hate you, too, I think._

He wants to tell her why. To give her that, at least. _Your sister is the one I want to love, to be with, to fight with, and be better for._ The words linger on his tongue. It would be so easy just to let them slip out. _I’m in love with Amy_. But these are things he hasn’t even said to Amy yet, and he’s not so sure he wants to give the feelings over to Jo first. It’s strange to think, since there was a time when Jo March would’ve been first in everything in his life. But things change, don’t they? 

Jo is childhood. She’s the warmth and the rose colored glasses of never wanting to grow up, of a sunny and golden youth, free of cares or responsibilities. It’s a fine fantasy, cozy and warm, like their summers spent jubilantly, but he can’t stay in its comfort forever. 

Amy is realizing that growing up isn’t so bad after all. That it’s all just another adventure, and one that he _wants_ to embark on, if she’s there with him. 

There are tears peeking out of the corners of Jo’s eyes, though he’s not sure if they’re for him, her, or Beth. 

“Please—” His voice cracks. “Please say we’re still friends, Jo. I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

Jo gives him a half smile and lopsided hug, fiddling with one last olive. “Of course, Teddy. Always.” If she doesn’t quite look him in the eye or if she seems just a little distracted when she picks up the tray of charcuterie, he doesn’t say anything. 

If she lingers in the doorway, just a little, like she wants to say something else, he doesn’t say anything then either. 

Amy slips past Jo into the kitchen, picking a cornichon from the tray and ignoring Jo’s tut of disapproval.

“I’ve got tea orders,” she says, nonchalant, ignoring the lingering energy between him and her sister, as she makes her way to the kettle. 

He nods and begins plucking mugs from the cabinet by the sink, lining them up on the counter as Amy hands him the teas everyone has requested. Chamomile for Beth and Mrs. March, chai for Meg, lapsang souchong for Mr. March and John, and loose-leaf rooibos for herself. For good measure, and for Jo and Laurie, she sets the coffee to brew as well. With the precision of someone who could tell with his eyes closed which mug belongs to whom, he places the various teas in their various mugs. 

They work in silent and practiced ease, sliding past one another so effortlessly he suspects it’s taking quite a bit of thought. Not once do her fingers brush his. 

Theirs has been a dance of almost touches and sideways smiles this last month and a half, orbiting but never reaching. Leaving so much behind in those between spaces. 

He waits for Amy to speak. She, like her sister, is able to fill a silence with meaning. 

She breaks it delicately. Slowy, carefully, she suggests. “You should… go home.”

At first, he thinks she means it because she doesn’t want him around anymore. But he notes the determined way she isn’t looking at him. The obstinate straight line of her lips, as though she’s fighting a smile. He can feel the tension in her request. It amuses him. “I should, should I?” he teases, risking a step closer to her. 

He’d find a way to the moon if that’s where she wanted him. Doesn’t she know she’s got him wrapped around her finger? 

“Yeah,” she nods, rifling through the cabinet in front of her and landing softly on the balls of her feet when she finds what she’s looking for. “I think that’d be… the right thing to do.” 

She still hasn’t looked at him.

“The right thing?” He moves to stand behind her, so close he can feel the heat of her back. If she just tilted her head back, he’d be able to kiss her.

As if reading his mind, she slides past him toward the stove, where the kettle has started to sing again. “The right thing,” she confirms, busying herself with filling mugs with water and honey. 

“Hm,” he murmurs, closing the distance between them again. He brushes his fingers under the hem of her tank top and presses his lips against her jaw, feather light. “You know how much I like to be right.” 

Some large part of him would like nothing more than to kiss her right now. It would be so easy to turn her into him, to lift her head, to capture her mouth against his. But Jo’s indignant shout rings out clear as day and he stops. 

_Not here._ That’s what she’s trying to say to him. She meets his eye and offers a half-smile. 

Then, with two steadying breaths, she picks up three mugs and leaves Laurie, once again, almost alone in the Marches’ kitchen. 

He has to think, if there is a god, any god, they are laughing at him right now. Two March sisters. Two propositions. Both a surprise. His decision in each situation is as easy as it is visceral. He knows exactly what he wants now.

He brings the remaining three mugs with him and settles into his high-backed chair to play a few more rounds before he announces his decision. 

“What?!” Jo exclaims just as she’s picking up the card for winning the last round. “Teddy you can’t!” He feels not apprehension but relief at the disapproval that flashes in her eyes. She's so quickly back to her old self again. 

They'll be okay.

“I go back to work on Wednesday,” he says smoothly. Jo and Amy both know he’d been planning to stay here anyway, so the nonchalance to his voice makes it sound more like one of his whims. “It’ll just be easier if I have to stay late or go in early.” He tries to appease her. “I’ll be just across the street, Jo. And I’ll still be coming by for dinner basically every night. You’ll still be able to cast your judgement upon me.”

He doesn’t look at Amy. 

Jo levels him with a look that says the conversation isn’t over, and he has to admit that the excuse is flimsy, thin enough for Jo to poke a hole in with a single word. But he’s packing his suitcase haphazardly that evening and Jo helps him take his things over, carrying on a one-sided argument all the way there.

The big old house is empty and dusty and silent when the door closes behind Jo, who leaves him with one last skeptical eyebrow raise. 

It’s almost midnight when Amy texts. Not that he was waiting up. His phone flashes, and her message— _u up?—_ makes him laugh. 

In response, he sends back the only appropriate reply he can think of: the eggplant emoji.

She sends him an eye roll back, and he watches the light turn off in her room mere seconds later. 

He opens the door before she can knock. “Saw your light turn off,” he shrugs in answer to her questioning look, shutting the door decisively behind them when she walks inside.

“And you timed it?”

So what if he did?

“You okay?” He asks, soft, nudging her foot with his, when she’s silent for too long.

It is, admittedly, a little awkward. They haven’t been completely alone since he left Paris almost four months ago. 

He’s been following her lead—he was the one to leave, and so he’d decided she was the one who would decide what came next. He is the one who left, and so she gets to be the one to decide how or when to let him back in. And he will give her as much of himself as she is willing to take. 

“Yeah, I’m good,” she nods. She turns toward him, a small, shy smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “It’s nothing. I just…” She’s quiet. “…Missed you.”

That turns over somewhere in his chest.

“Missed you, too.” He brings her in for a hug and she is warm and familiar in his arms. She presses her nose to his collarbone.

It nearly bowls him over, the strength of what he feels for her. With Jo and the rest of the Marches around, it’s easy to suppress—to compartmentalize, to pretend that it’s just part of what he feels for her entire family. But here, with just her in his arms, he knows, unequivocally, he’s in love with Amy March. 

But he’s known that all along. 

And so, all there is to do now is kiss her. 

———

It’s not usually a surprise to find Theodore Laurence somewhere on the Marches’ property, for he had taken to heart the first invitation to make himself at home and done his very best to find the upper limit of that welcome. And it certainly was rarely surprising for Jo, who was the reason he was there 90% of the time. But at 6:00 on a Saturday morning, when she’s stumbling down bleary-eyed from the attic after another full night of burning both the midnight oil and her so-called genius (she was not convinced of its existence these days), in search of coffee, Jo can say with confidence that she doesn’t expect to see him in her foyer.

She yelps as she lands on the last step, at last catching sight of him leaning against the door. 

He’s looking at her with an expression that is far too amused for her liking. 

Her hair is, she’s sure, going every which way from the angry way she’d been running her fingers through it all night, and she still has her old writing jacket—dingy and moth-eaten now—wrapped tightly around her shoulders. She must look a sight, but that’s no reason for him to be smirking at her like that. He’s the one not wearing a shirt.

“What’re you doing here?”

“That’s a lovely way to greet your dear old friend Teddy, Jo.”

He’s still leaning against the door, looking too casual and too awake for how early it is. 

“It’s six in the morning.”

“So it is!” he responds, chipper and taking too much delight in her aggravated state. 

“You’re not wearing a shirt.”

Still grinning, he looks down at his own torso with exaggerated affect and gasps. “How’d that happen!” 

She flips him the bird and is about to offer him some coffee, when Amy bounces down the stairs, fresh-faced, hair in a high braided ponytail, and also looking too awake for the ungodly hour. “Jo, go to bed,” she says sweetly, as if she’s heard the entire conversation between Jo and Laurie, if it can be called that. 

“You’re awake, too?”

“That’s what can happen if you actually sleep at night,” Amy quips as she hands Teddy headphones. 

“Well—”

Amy cuts off whatever it was that Teddy was going to say decisively. “You’re going to have to manage with wired.” Even in her sleep-deprived state, Jo can tell Teddy’s dissatisfied by the development. “You managed for actual decades before Apple came out with AirPods. You’ll live.” 

Jo watches as he nods, summarily chastened, takes the headphones from Amy, and wraps them around his hand absently.

She squints at the two of them, in their matching athleisure—though, in this case, there doesn’t seem to be any leisure to it—and their matching expressions as they turn back to her in concert. It seems too normal. And that, she thinks, is definitely weird. “Do you guys...do this often?”

Laurie shrugs and just looks at Amy.

Amy, for her part, just appraises her. Jo raises an eyebrow back. Whatever her sister sees, she decides something. Amy straightens, pops her own AirPods into her ears, and takes a step toward the door. 

“We should go.”

Laurie pushes off of the wall and takes one last glance at Jo as he guides Amy out of the door with a hand on her back. “Jo, drink some water and get some sleep? I’ll text you later about Tuesday.” Never mind that she’s forgotten what’s significant about Tuesday. She’ll figure it out later. 

As she heads into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee and the front door closes behind them, momentarily casting the front of the house in the buttery glow of the morning sun, she hears them arguing about distance and route, and then a peal of laughter from Amy that’s also too happy for how early it is.

If she were more awake, she likely would have been more discerning. But instead, she just pours herself a steaming mug from the French press and heads back up to her desk to do work until her eyes cross.

It’s not until hours later, after she’s eaten and slept and showered, when the morning’s events begin taking on a curious sheen. There’s been neither hide nor hair of either of them since dawn, and she’d be seriously worried if it weren’t the two people in her life who run for fun, but it does occur to her to start getting suspicious. 

They’re both runners, she knows that—has always known that, what with _Theo_ Laurence being a four-year varsity letterman in both soccer and lacrosse, and Amy March who could’ve had an Ivy League field hockey scholarship if she hadn’t decided on art school. And she does vaguely remember the two of them training together the one year they overlapped in high school. But waking up at the crack of dawn? To do a casual ten miles? Without shirts? 

It’s all too much for her poor brain, so she tries to leave it be. 

She really does. 

But the thought insists, and it reveals itself like a dream. 

The more she thinks about it, the less real it becomes. 

Later that day, she, Beth, and Meg are sitting in the backyard in the warmth of the setting summer sun. Meg has a couple of Daisy’s tiny dresses in her lap, working a needle and thread through tears the girl has rendered. Beth’s eyes are closed, soaking in the low sun. They can hear Amy and Teddy, who returned from their apparent ultramarathon with no explanation, but carrying pints of ice cream from a shop two towns over, collapsing into the grass by the pond in laughter. 

Jo has read the same line of feedback from a particularly brutal editor three times when it comes to her, suddenly and fully formed. 

“Do you think they’ve slept together?” 

Meg doesn’t look up. “Who?”

“Amy and Teddy.”

Meg lifts her eyes, catching Beth’s. They share a knowing glance before Meg levels Jo with an incredulous look that is supposed to mean something. 

“What?”

“Don’t be naive, Jo,” is all Meg says.

“What does that mean?”

Her sisters share another look. 

“What that means is,” Beth says softly, with mirth dancing in her eyes, “of course they have.” 

Jo turns her head to Beth, her turn for incredulity. 

“I’m sick, Jo,” Beth says with a small smirk. “Not a nun.” Her Beth! The betrayal! 

“Did Amy tell you?” 

“No, she didn’t tell me,” Meg responds, still more focused on pulling the thread through the delicate cloth. 

“Then how do you know?” Jo challenges. 

“Jo. Seriously?” Meg finally puts the needle down to give her another exasperated look. “You can’t possibly be this naive.”

Jo returns Beth’s steady, amused gaze as she responds to Meg. “What?!”

Meg sighs and shakes her head, ever the suffering eldest sister, and looks over to where Teddy has slung their youngest sister across his shoulder like she weighs nothing and is walking decisively toward the pond. “You can’t tell?”

“Tell what? Looks like Teddy and Amy to me,” she says as they watch him drop Amy into the water and hear Amy shriek in harmony with the splash she makes. 

“He can’t keep his hands off of her!”

“He’s a tactile person.” Once she hears it said out loud, she knows it sounds ridiculous. But she and Teddy have always been physical with each other, a holdover from when they would roughhouse as children, so she’s never considered it unusual for him to be the same with anyone else. 

“Not like that.” Beth gestures toward the pond, where Teddy has doubled over in laughter and has two arms outstretched to try to keep Amy from pulling him down with her. “They’re… that’s not the same.”

She looks back in their direction and it’s easier to see now that Beth and Meg have pointed it out. It’s there, in his hands that are a little too low on Amy’s waist, her grip that’s a little too casual against Laurie’s arm, the smiles this morning that were a little too charmed, too secret, too knowing.

She watches the effortless way Laurie draws Amy toward him because he doesn’t think anyone is watching them, the sweetness in the brush of his fingers against her wrist, the gentle way he tucks hair out of Amy’s face before he dips his face against her neck, the easy way her sister sinks her weight into his chest when he wraps his arms around her, the familiarity in Amy’s shove against Teddy’s hips when he moves to throw her into the water again.

She hadn’t noticed anything before, but now, watching them, she knows in an instant that it’s not just sex.

 _“I can’t be with you,”_ he’d said. _“It wouldn’t work.”_

She’d thought, in that moment, that he rebuffed her because he knew she didn’t actually mean it. That he was protecting his heart. It hadn’t occurred to her that there might be deeper meaning to his words. 

She’s thought about Teddy a lot—about dating him, what it would be like to date him, to _be_ with him, be _his_ , be more than what they’ve always been. She thought about it before he told her he loved her but hinted at it so deafeningly that she always knew, and she thought about it a lot after he said the actual words. She thought about it even more after she said no, that it would never work, and hasn’t stopped thinking about it now that he has told her no, too. 

He’s right, of course, that it wouldn’t work. Being around Laurie is fun and joyful, always, but it’s an escape. Their very own Never Never Land. But the best thing for each of them is not the other. 

Even still, she doesn’t exactly regret her confession the other day, desperate as it might have been. Her better angels may have since prevailed, but they did need to have it out one final time on his terms, and she’d meant it at the time. She really had. And though rejection had smarted in the moment, it’s the distance—subtle, as if he hasn’t even realized, but still noticeable, to her—he’s put between them since that hurts more. 

She hadn’t realized there might be a deeper reason until now.

And yet, looking at her sister and her best friend, perhaps it should’ve been clear.

* * *

**july** —

By way of nothing one afternoon, while they’re hanging out in the turret, Jo asks him, “Is it someone else?”

“What?”

“Why you said it wouldn’t work,” she explains, lifting her head up from the seat of the couch, over whose arm she has flung her legs. “Between us.” She says it casually enough, as though she’s not fishing for something here. 

“No, Jo. I just...got over it.” She arches an eyebrow. She knows him too well and can tell when he’s lying to her, just like he can tell when she has a motive. 

She’s silent for a moment, watching him, as though turning over her different options in her head. “Is it Amy?” she asks finally. Quietly, softly, tenderly. 

And he knows she knows the truth already. She always did know him well.

He looks at her. He could tell her that he didn’t mean for it to happen and would’ve done everything possible to stop it if he could’ve. But that’s the thing about loving someone, he’s learned. Once it starts, there isn’t anything you can do to stop it. And at this point, there’s very little he wants to do to stop it. “Yeah,” he says at last. “It’s Amy.”

She nods. “When?”

He sighs. He’s never been able to keep secrets from Jo. “I don’t know. A while.” 

She was always there. 

When he thinks back on his own childhood, most of the color is Jo, in bright and saturated shades that command attention. She is the loudest melodies, the strongest memories. But, if he remembers to look away from center stage, the color fades, the music quiets, and there—always there—with a sweet smile, an impish and confident quirk of an eyebrow, a soft word, is Amy.

It just took him a while to figure it out. 

His love for Jo is the big emotions—joy, excitement, envy, anger—the ones he feels and names easily. It takes up a lot of space in his heart, but it’s brash and obvious and unmistakable. She was the first girl he ever loved. She will always be the first girl he ever loved, and there’s nothing that could come along that would make him want to change that. But in the quagmire of adolescence, he’d mistaken big for interminable, bright for only, first for forever. 

It had taken time to recognize the quieter, slower love for Amy. 

His feelings for Amy hadn’t forced open any barriers or pushed over any walls, didn’t redefine family or worthiness. But they did transform what he thought of as forever. 

It’s just as big, his love for Amy, but it fits against him instead of forcing his heart into shape. 

Jo looks thoughtful, her head tilted and a small but genuine smile on her face. “I think it’s great, Laurie.”

“You do?” He’s a little surprised, though he thinks he would have been surprised no matter what Jo’s reaction was.

“I mean, I’m not _thrilled_ that you decided to,” she waves her hand between them— _whatever the hell_ — “with my baby sister. I went to college with you. I’ve seen…” She pauses and then, never shy of dramatics, shudders. Altogether too much, then. “And I don’t love that she’s sneaking out of here every night like she’s sixteen again. But yeah.” She passes him another plate to dry and looks him dead in the eye. “It’s great.” 

The emotion that floods his body could be relief—it could also be confusion. He hasn’t been nervous about talking to Jo about it, necessarily, but it has also been a weight on his shoulders. Jo is his best friend, after all. He would’ve been anxious about introducing any future girlfriend to Jo. But Amy is Jo’s baby sister, and that adds layers of loyalty and complexity that he’s been a little timid of unraveling. 

Amy is Jo’s baby sister and, even though he and Jo have always been each other’s favorite person, he knows he can’t compete with a lifetime of unconditional love, picking fights, and partnering in crime. 

So, he’d been expecting any number of reactions from Jo: her calling him an idiot, her disapproval, her laughing in his face, even her anger. But immediate acceptance? It hadn’t ever crossed his mind. 

“You know,” Jo murmurs, picking at a loose thread on the cushion. “There was a time when I thought you and Beth would be good together.”

He guffaws, remembering the high school dances and sorority date parties she played matchmaker for. “If I remember correctly, you also tried to pawn me off on Meg once or twice.”

“Everyone but Amy,” she admits. 

“Funny how things work out.” 

“Up until about six months ago, she was too young for you,” she deflects. Her brow is furrowed in deep thought. “Do you love her?” 

“Yes.” The word comes out easily. He doesn’t need to think about it anymore. If he’s being completely honest, this _had_ started as the ultimate fuck you to Jo March, sleeping with her younger sister. A way to get back at Jo in the best way he knew how. And she—he’s never really thought about Amy’s motivation in all of this, but he knows she’s always had a crush on him. It had been endearing when they were younger, flattering even, that Jo’s kid sister blushed whenever she talked to him. But she’d grown out of the crush by high school, flirting—to Jo’s endless chagrin—with older boys at the Moffats’ basement parties, dating guys named Thad and Chad and Trip, and charming an endless string of his college buddies with her sunny, easygoing smile by the time she was fifteen.

And then… In London, he’d been the one charmed. She was simultaneously so different and so familiar in London, with that same bright Amy March glint in her eye, but so grown up, so beautiful. She had stunned him. Amy had always been sure of herself, but that night at the Vaughns’, when she’d marched right up to him so decisively, he was as done in as so many of his friends before him. 

“Does she feel the same?”

He lifts his eyes to meet Jo’s and shrugs. “No clue.” 

They’ve never defined what they are. They were careful not to define it. And now that he wants so much more, he can feel her holding back all the more. He’d thought maybe it had been a fuck you to Jo for her, too, to lean into the first and all of the subsequent kisses, but he also thought that he could feel something more. Something deeper, in the way she curled around him. But, she’s pulling away from him at the same time—distant in the daylight. 

Whatever the case, all of this, it’s only landed him in a situation where he’s really just fucking himself over now.

“You don’t know?” Jo’s voice pitches up, incredulity clear. 

“Haven’t talked about it.” 

“You haven’t talked about it.” She’s got that Jo March look on her face like she’s deciding how to ride into battle and he considers how much ground he should concede. “How long has this been going on?”

He squints, doing the mental math. “Six months?”

“Six months?”

“Maybe seven?”

The math of their relationship, if it can be called that, isn’t clean. He and Amy have been sleeping together again for a month now, but there was a full three months they didn’t even talk. And before that—

“You’ve been sleeping with my sister for seven months and you haven’t _talked about it_?!” 

“We’re usually kind of preoccupied, Jo.” The glare she levels at him could raze miles of highrises. He has the decency—and wherewithal—to look a little sheepish when she swats a firm palm at the back of his head. 

“Well what are you going to do about that?”

Hell if he knows.

“You have to talk to her about this!”

Understatement. “I know.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Last thing he wants to do right now. “Not really.”

“Do we need to have the talk?”

Scratch that. That would be the last thing he wants to do right now.

He chokes on a breath. “I’m sorry?”

She rolls her eyes, the look in her eye telling him summarily that he’s stupid. “The one where I tell you if you hurt her, I’ll kill you.”

“Oh.” It’s almost funny, how relieved he is to have his life threatened, rather than his sensibilities. “Would it make you feel better?”

Jo rolls her eyes again. “Just…I know I don’t need to say this, because you’re the best man I know, Teddy. But she’s my baby sister, so I’m going to anyway. If you hurt her, I will kill you.” 

He knows she would, too. 

“Duly noted,” he salutes. But he keeps his voice soft, so both of them know he’s sincere. 

And he knows that the smile she gives him is real. 

———

Their days pass languidly, the weeks more quickly. Suddenly, they’re in the heart of summer. 

The crowd around her buzzes with alcohol and loud, youthful levity. Jo has never felt so old. She feels it to her bones. 

She hadn’t wanted to come today.

She’d made it very clear that she had better things to do with her time than test her patience with the level of _bro_ enjoying the temperate summer day at the beer garden with three people who weren’t even her friends, whose best and most apt description was well-heeled. 

But the edge of desperation is his final please, the intensity of the plea in his eyes—she gave him this one. 

She tells herself now that she gave in to save Teddy from himself. He and Fred Vaughn have been engaged in a years-long pissing match disguised as too-affable friendship since their final club days and she isn’t sure they’ve grown out of it. In fact, sitting between them, it might be worse now than it’s ever been. It’s nauseating, how cordial they’re being with each other. 

They’re three pitchers deep between the five of them when Amy floats in, hair curled, sundress falling softly around her knees, and a blazer draped loosely over her shoulders. She greets Kate first and then Frank and Fred with kisses on each cheek before bumping a shoulder against Jo’s and accepting a beer from Laurie, who looks a little surprised to see her. 

“How’d it go?” Jo asks. Her own voice sounds too loud in her head. 

A grin splits open on Amy’s face as she lifts the glass to her mouth. “Really well, I think.”

“What was this?” asks Frank at the same time Fred says, “Was this your Harvard interview?”

“You had an interview with Harvard?” Laurie asks a beat later, eyes dark. 

Amy swallows her sip of beer and nods. “You know I was waitlisted.” She’s starting to answer Fred when Laurie interrupts. 

“So you’re really going through with it?” He asks it so casually, Jo almost misses the edge in the question. When she looks at his face, she realizes the way he asks is meant to be nearly unkind.

It had been unexpected when Amy had declared her intention to go to law school, and Jo had privately thought it bordered on mercenary, but as the idea came into form, it began to make more and more sense. Amy, who’d always been so ready with an argument or remark that cut straight to the heart, would make an excellent lawyer. She does still think it’s a shame that Amy could give up her art so easily, but if Aunt Josephine is willing to pay for law school for them, better Amy than herself to rise to the occasion.

Amy looks right back at Laurie, square in the eyes, with a flinty expression clouding her face. “Yes,” she says shortly, in a rare tone Jo recognizes as their own mother’s, when she won’t tolerate any arguments from anyone. 

“Oh,” crows Kate, not recognizing or studiously ignoring the war waging silently between Amy and Laurie. “It’ll be so lovely to have another barrister among us.”

Laurie scoffs, and the quiet sound says so much more than any words ever could. Jo watches an entire internal fight pass through her sister’s face in response. But Amy is nothing if not proper, so she gives one last stony glance to Laurie, who rolls his eyes and taps his phone alive, and turns to the three siblings with a sunny smile like she hasn’t a care in the world to answer Fred’s curiosity, leaving Jo to handle a sulking Theodore Laurence. 

He’d been in such fine form all afternoon, so charming and gracious, even with Fred, that this about face was giving her emotional whiplash. 

Even accustomed to the shades of his mean streak, Jo is taken aback by how cruel he seems in this moment. The pampered and privileged scion of one of Boston’s most prominent families, Laurie had had a tendency toward arrogance if he wasn’t careful, but he almost always was. And he’d grown out of the worst of it by late high school, and these days he was usually the one reining in Jo’s worst impulses. 

She’s even more surprised to see it directed at Amy, who had never been on the receiving end in all their years of knowing him, and whom, more importantly and by the man’s own admission, he was in love with. 

She rounds on him, quiet and biting. “Teddy, what the hell is your problem?” 

He ignores her and keeps his attention glued to his phone, flicking through the ESPN app with a vigor and anger that not even a poorly played soccer game deserves. 

She sighs. She doesn’t want to leave it—it’s not in her nature to leave anything be—but there is something, something in the way that Teddy’s anger has closed in on itself and something in the tense set of Amy’s shoulders, even as she jokes and drinks with the Vaughn siblings, that tells Jo not now. If she presses any more now, he might leave a mess none of them wants to clean up.

She picks up her glass and drinks. 

She hadn’t wanted to come today.

Left with little else to do, she grabs Teddy’s credit card, goes to the bar, and buys them all another couple of rounds. 

The night ends earlier than it would have if Teddy had remained in lively spirits, but Jo can’t bring herself to be too upset about that. Amy leaves each of the Vaughns with another set of kisses on each cheek and a promise to visit them in London again soon. Jo offers a polite, distant wave. Teddy, who is still skulking, says a terse goodbye to Frank and Kate, and doesn’t even acknowledge Fred. 

The tension in their Uber home is so palpable, so near suffocating, that Jo finally understands the utility of the phrase _could cut it with a knife_. From the backseat, she can see the vein throbbing in Teddy’s clenched jaw, the one that only appears when he’s angry, frustrated, and trying to keep it all inside. She can hear Amy’s exasperation in every sharp, short breath out. It is the longest thirty minute car ride she’s ever endured. 

When they pull up to the driveway of Orchard House, their ringing chorus of thank yous to their driver sounds lighter than any of them have a right to. Jo lingers and Teddy kicks his toes against the gravel walk.

“Teddy,” Jo starts when nobody speaks or moves, exasperation clear in her voice and the set of her hand on her hip, trying to cajole an explanation out of him. “Will you please—”

“Jo,” he says, cutting her off firmly. He’s looking past her and straight at Amy, who looks the least impressed she’s ever been.

“Jo,” Amy echoes, soft, a second later. She isn’t looking at Jo either. “Can you—”

“Oh.” She’s sure she sounds surprised. Her head pings between the two of them. “Sure.” 

Instinct tells her to stay, to help defend—she’s not sure who she would help defend and she’s not sure either one of them needs it, so she’s left with nothing to do but make her way down the dark walk. She picks her way down the gravel slowly and takes her time to find her key and unlock the front door. Just in case—just in case either of them needs her.

But it hits her suddenly that this isn’t her fight. She has no part in any of it anymore. She’s not sure if she ever did. 

Amy doesn’t wait for Jo to be out of earshot, so she can hear her sister’s angry voice ring out in the night air. 

“What the fuck is your problem?” 

Teddy’s response is quiet, because the few seconds it takes her to open and close the door behind her are almost silent. She steals glances through the sidelights and can see Teddy’s sheepish stance, his hands in the pockets of his jeans and his head bowed as he listens to Amy rail at him. Jo can’t hear what’s being said anymore, but she can imagine Amy’s ire, the strong and firm argument their future lawyer developed during the long drive home.

She dallies in the foyer for as long as she can, toeing off her shoes and rearranging the flowers on the credenza, hoping to catch either of them when it’s over. After a while, when it looks like the fight won’t end, she heads to the kitchen to rummage up some dinner, and even reheats a portion for Amy, but ends up eating the second plate of pasta when her sister doesn’t appear after half an hour. 

Jo considers waiting up for Amy, to try and pull an explanation from her sister, but falls asleep before Amy comes back inside. She doesn’t hear or see her sister until late the next morning, already fresh from a run and pouring oat milk into her coffee.

“What was all that last night?” Jo asks between mouthfuls of buckwheat pancakes, trying not to sound too curious. 

“Hm?” Amy responds, distractedly, as she fiddles with the mug. 

“Yesterday—with Teddy. What was that all about?”

“Oh,” Amy says, taking a sip of her coffee and shrugging. “Just an old fight.”

“An old fight?” She hadn’t realized they could have _old fights_. 

“Yeah,” Amy nods. “Don’t worry about it, Jo.” 

“Amy—”

“It’s nothing.” She’s already halfway out of the kitchen. “I’m going to go shower. Don’t eat all the pancakes.” 

That afternoon, when she can only pull similar wisps out of Teddy, who answers her shortly, with an unsatisfying “It’s nothing, Jo. Don’t worry about it. We’re fine,” the realization comes in a sudden wave. They have an entire context that has nothing to do with her. From ten mile runs at the crack of dawn to inside jokes about cornichons to big fights that simmer under the surface, there is so much now that she doesn’t know about the two of them—and maybe never will.

———

She doesn’t wait for Jo to be out of earshot before she turns on him. “What the fuck is your problem?” And from his wince and the way he won’t meet her eye, she thinks he has a very good idea what his problem is. “How many times are we going to have this fight, Laurie?” 

“I don’t have any problems, and we’re not having a fight,” he parries. “You actually have to talk to someone to have a fight.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.” He’s staring at her with an eyebrow raised, looking for all the world like the devil-may-care Laurie she first encountered in London. 

Acid and something else caustic—are they tears?—rise up in her throat. Before the roiling in her chest spills over, she decides she’s not going to deal with this tonight and turns on her heel, ready to march up the driveway home so she can complain about him to anyone who will listen, when his voice cuts through the brightest of her anger. 

“Why didn’t you tell me about your interview?” He says it quietly, and it stops her in her tracks. 

She shrugs, stilted, back still to him. “There was nothing to tell.”

“Fred knew,” he accuses, tone baiting. 

If it was his goal to make her angry, he succeeds, because she responds, the skirt of her dress whipping up around her as she turns again to face him. “Fred asked!” 

She hates how high her voice pitches, how hysterical she sounds to her own ears, and hates most how she can feel hot tears burning in the corner of her eyes. In the span of a few hours, she’d gone from being elated that her interview had gone well and ready to celebrate the success with Jo and Laurie, to being so unceremoniously brought back down to earth by his shitty mood that her heart still feels heavy in the pit of her stomach. 

“So now I have to ask for you to tell me about your life?”

“Yeah, that’s kind of how it goes, Laurie. If you want to know things about someone, you actually have to ask them.” 

She blows out a frustrated breath and sighs. Somewhere along the way, she ceded some power over her happiness to him, and would do anything in this moment to take it all back. “I don’t want to fight with you tonight. And I really don’t want to have this fight again. I know you still hate the idea of law school, so I didn’t tell you, okay? An interview doesn’t mean anything. It really wasn’t important. Fred asked me if I was around today, so I told him I was going to be in Cambridge and he let me—” 

She pauses, the thought occurring to her suddenly. “Wait. Is that what this is about?”

“What?”

“Are you jealous of Fred?”

He scoffs. Where a moment ago she could see a flicker of remorse, it’s gone now and has been replaced with a haughty, near mutinous expression. “I’m not jealous of Fred Vaughn.” 

“Oh-kay,” she drawls, unconvinced. “Then what?”

He doesn’t answer and she decides she’s done prodding. She meant it when she said she didn’t want to have this fight. She doesn’t have the energy to fight him on this, on anything, tonight. So she turns again, leaving him behind her again, and is stopped by his voice—again.

“Amy—” Her name settles in her ears desperately.

“What?”

“I don’t hate the idea of law school.” 

This isn’t where she thought he’d start. “What?”

“I don’t.” He walks toward her to close the distance she put between them, stepping in front of her. He’s close enough to touch her, but doesn’t reach out. “I heard you, okay? In Paris. I heard you. I think you’re going to be amazing. You are amazing.” He nudges her chin up, so she’s looking into his eyes, and he’s smiling at her—the one where his lips are half quirked and his eyes dance, like she’s his favorite thing to look at. “You can tell me things, Amy. Even law school things. I—I’m here for you to tell things to.” His voice is soft, contrite, almost pleading and he looks like he wants to say something else. 

He’s looking at her so intently and she knows exactly what he wants to say. It’s the very real conversation they’re dancing around and need to have, but she can’t bring herself to let him have it. 

“Laurie, don’t.” She shakes her head, shakes him off. “Not tonight.” 

He looks like he wants to argue, is opening his mouth to do so when she kisses him to shut him up. His response is sweet, tender, enough to break her heart in two. Hands warm where they cradle her chin, thumbs soft against cheeks, he tastes like peppermint gum when he catches her lip between his teeth. 

Amy’s vaguely aware that the light is still on in the foyer, and they’re within spitting distance of the front door, but she finds she doesn’t really care that anyone could look out to see her slip a hand through Laurie’s hair and pull him in closer to her. 

When he pulls back, he looks ravished, pupils dilated, hair a mess, and breathing ragged. She must look the same, because his half smirk is a little too proud when he catches her eye and winks. He holds out a hand, angling his body toward his empty house. “C’mon.”

She tried not to make it a habit, but like some kind of magnetic pull, she started spending more and more nights with Laurie until it became nearly every night. Now that she’s had him back for a few weeks, she’s not sure how she lasted so long without him. She can’t bring herself to imagine what she’ll do when she has to again. 

There’s a conversation they need to have, but she’s going to do everything she can to put it off for as long as she can. 

She doesn’t know how to do this—be that Amy, the one who hooks up with, and then wakes up to, Laurie—here, in this place where she was the Amy who needed her hand bandaged up and fell through the pond and set the only copy of Jo’s short story contest submission on fire. She doesn’t know how to do this with him when at every turn, she’s reminded that she is on the outside of the tag team he and her sister make—the trees carved with their initials, the echoes of games they left her out of, the years and years of being just a tagalong. 

It’s so much easier to not think or talk about it, to let him take her home, to tilt her head up and kiss him when the door closes behind them, to thread her fingers through his hair, let him slip her blazer off her shoulders, and to wrap her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck so he can take her upstairs. It’s easy, too, to slide her hands under his t-shirt and fall against his mattress and let him unbutton her dress so it falls as a filmy pool at her ankles. It’s easy, the way he slips one finger inside of her and then two and then the full weight of him, easy to cant her hips to meet him, and come undone with him in and on and all around her.

And it’s easiest of all to tuck her head between his neck and shoulder and fall asleep with his arms around her. 

In the morning, he dances around his kitchen while he makes her breakfast, his loping strides taking him past her spot at the island more than they need to, a brush of a finger against her waist or a press of his lips to her neck each time he moves by her. 

There is a conversation they need to have, but—not yet. Not yet. 

She hasn’t been careful enough with any of this at all, least of all her own heart, but she can still attempt to salvage something from the wreckage.

So they talk about nothing at all, the room filling with their laughter. In the quiet moments, she lets herself imagine what this life with him might actually be like. She traces sketches in her mind: lazy Sunday afternoons with the sun streaming in through the windows, raucous dinners with her family around the austere dining room table, and his half-lidded smiles in those early morning hours.

But for now, it’s just like when she was in high school, stealing silently out of the house, only slipping into her shoes once the back door, which doesn’t creak or thud like the front, is closed quietly behind her. 

She knows her family is pretending not to notice that her bedroom is empty most nights, that she sneaks into and out of the house like she’s sixteen and going to the Moffat brothers’ basement parties. She’s also not stupid enough to think they don’t have an idea of where she’s going, the start of her nightly absconding coinciding perfectly, after all, with Laurie’s sudden decision to stop sleeping on their futon. She has also adopted her sister’s erstwhile habit of stealing Laurie’s clothes and she’s definitely not stupid enough to think they haven’t noticed _that_. 

Except, maybe, they haven’t noticed anything at all.

“Is that Teddy’s shirt?” Jo asks curiously one morning, a single eyebrow perfectly arched over her bowl of granola when Amy steps into the kitchen wearing a Harvard sweater that most definitely isn’t hers.

 _Yes_ , she wants to answer, a petulant voice in her head rising above all her other thoughts. _So are the sweatpants and the socks, for that matter._ _What of it?_ But that would be too obvious and ungracious of her. “Oh,” she says instead, light as can be. “Might be. I grabbed it from the living room. Thought it was yours. Laurie must’ve left it.” 

As far as excuses go, it’s flimsy at best, and Amy breathes in relief when Jo doesn’t press further. When it really comes down to it, she doesn’t have any explanations that would satisfy Jo or herself. 

Just like she hadn’t chosen to start sleeping with her sister’s ex- and once again best friend, almost maybe could have been boyfriend, who should be like a brother to her, who’s been in their lives forever and always will be, it hadn’t been rational thought, exactly, that motivated her to proposition him in the kitchen that Sunday several weeks ago. All she’d known was she missed him and she could do something to stop missing him, so she’d done it. Honest to god, it’s not a choice. It’s a thing that happened that she let happen again and that she keeps letting happen. 

She never would’ve chosen this. 

If it were a choice, she would’ve chosen to stop a long time ago.

But now, it’s almost as essential to her as breathing, and she doesn’t know if she’ll ever want to stop.

* * *

**august—**

When he comes downstairs from his shower, Jo March is sitting, as she often does, with her legs propped up on the smooth mahogany of his great-grandfather’s desk, with a first edition copy of _The Pickwick Papers_ in her lap. 

“We need to go to Eataly,” she says without looking up from the page.

“Go yourself,” he says shortly, running a hand through his hair to shake out some water. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and the last thing he wants to do with his day is drive into Boston to spend an inordinate amount of time in some bougie, faux authentic Italian grocery store among tourists and some of the city’s best and bougiest.

“I don’t want to drive.”

“Then call an Uber.”

Jo snaps her book shut and looks up at him. _That’s ridiculous_ , the motion says. She pulls her trump card. “It’s for Amy.”

He raises his eyebrows. Amy, as far as he knows, is spending the day wedding dress shopping with the freshly engaged May Chester, something she’d been endlessly complaining about since she’d gotten the text from May weeks ago, asking her to be a bridesmaid. (“If you hate her so much, why don’t you just say no?” he’d asked, which was apparently a stupid question, from the underwhelmed way she’d turned to him and told him, in no uncertain terms, that there was absolutely no way she could say no.)

“We’re celebrating, and Daisy and Demi wanted the theme to be Italy, since they’ve been obsessed since you told them all about it last week. I think it’s just an excuse to eat their weight in gelato, but you know how much Ames loves that tomato focaccia. It’s a pretty good idea even if it did come from a couple of toddlers.” 

“You’re celebrating?” he asks, feeling suddenly and acutely adrift, and not quite sure why, though he has guesses.

The Marches are hospitable and welcoming to their bones, but theirs is a more relaxed and casual warmth. They aren’t prone to ceremony. Even Meg’s wedding had been a small backyard affair, with flowers cut from their garden and a cake baked lovingly, but a little messily, by Beth. It must be something big, for there to be an agreed upon theme. 

“Yeah.” She draws out the syllable, looking at him with appraising eyes, as if he’s the idiot for not immediately knowing what she means. “Amy getting into Harvard?” She says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Amy got into Harvard?” He tries for casual, but there’s a churn in his gut, rising steadily into his throat, and he chokes on the words. 

Jo’s hackles are up immediately, and her eyes on him peer directly through any bravado he could’ve feigned. “You didn’t know.” She doesn’t even pretend to pose it as a question. 

“Nope,” he says, popping the P shortly. 

“She didn’t tell you.”

He doesn’t respond. 

She tuts quietly in a way that reminds him of her mother. “You guys still haven’t talked?” 

If he’d thought indignant Jo was bad, sympathetic Jo is even worse. 

“Nope,” he repeats. 

Everything has been slightly off since that afternoon with the Vaughns, when he’d been halfway to confessing his feelings. He doesn’t want to have this conversation with Jo, but the person he does want—needs—to have it with has been studiously avoiding him between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. for weeks. Though she’s over almost every night, he rarely sees her in the daylight anymore, and though they talk, the topics are superficial.

“Teddy—” Jo starts, but doesn’t continue. 

He scrubs a hand over his face. 

“I know.” He knows what the problem is. Jo knows what the problem is. They all know what the problem is. 

“Do you want me to talk to her?” Jo offers quietly. 

For a brief moment, it’s tempting. But he also knows, in the end, that having Jo talk to her sister for him would be counterproductive. With a decisive sigh, he changes the subject. “We should get going, if you want to make it there and back by this picnic.”

Jo opens her mouth to say something, but doesn’t, instead placing the book back in its place on the wall of shelves, and giving him a light pat on the shoulder as she heads toward his car. 

In the end, the trip is less painful than he expected. They manage to find some soppressata that meets his standards, and even he can admit the _focaccia barese_ looks the part. Jo, for her part, merely smirks when he packs five pints of gelato into the car when they’re done. 

Later, after the sun sets, and the tangy smell of citronella candles mixes with the scent of sunscreen and summer wildflowers, and they’ve all had their fill of pizza and pasta, he finds Amy inside at her own party, standing at the kitchen island with the five pints open in front of her, her gaze off in the air.

“Hey.”

She starts, the spoon held aloft in her hand clattering onto the granite countertop. 

“Did something happen?” she straightens, panic setting in. He doesn’t blame her. A lifetime of March family festivities has taught them all to expect accidents, large and small. 

“No, no. Everyone’s fine. They’re feeling like s’mores out there,” he assures. “And wondering where you are.” 

“I didn’t think I’d been gone that long.” 

“You haven’t. But it’s kind of obvious when the guest of honor isn’t at her own party.” And perhaps he’s grown so attuned to her presence, it’s glaring when she’s gone. 

“Oh. Yeah.” She looks contrite. “I’ll be right out. I just…needed a break.”

“Everything okay?” It isn’t like Amy to be uncomfortable as the center of her family’s attention and affection. 

She flicks a finger at the spoon on the counter distractedly and shrugs. “Fine. Just… everyone’s making way too big of a deal about this.” 

“Well,” he settles a hip against the counter and crosses his arms in front of him. “We’re all pretty proud of you.”

She eyes him, expression unreadable. 

Now, or never. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks softly. “Jo says you found out weeks ago.” 

She shrugs again, stabs the spoon into the stracciatella, scraping at the surface. 

He stares at her, and she studies the gelato intently. 

Finally, he sits down on a stool in front of her. “Amy,” he whispers. Her name is a prayer on his lips. “Please look at me.”

She doesn’t meet his eyes. 

“Amy,” he repeats. Just as soft, tender. She’s the most precious thing he could hold in his heart. He leans forward, runs a thumb across her jaw and tilts her head toward him. There are tears in her eyes threatening to fall. He leans in and presses a soft, tender kiss to each and then the bridge of her nose, her cheeks, and finally her lips. He tries to tell her that way all the ways he loves her, since words have failed. “We’ve gotta have this out,” he breathes against her mouth. 

“Please don’t, Laurie.” She tries to push him away, to put a little more distance between them. “Please don’t ruin this.” 

Ruin this? Is she so afraid of him? So unsure of what he feels for her? Her words shoot through him like ice.

“Amy—”

“—No,” she cuts him off quickly, looking around to make sure everyone is still outside. “I won’t. I will not.” She says the words urgently. “I will not be a second choice, Laurie. I won’t be your stand-in for Jo. I thought you respected me more than that.” She’s growing desperate, and the crack of her voice wrenches in his chest. “Everything was fine! We were fine! Please don’t ruin it.”

He can see them tumbling, the walls she’d so carefully built up. Her composure. Her neatly stacked compartments. Gone in the span of seconds. The sight of her, shrinking from him, twists in his chest. Somehow, without realizing, without knowing he had the power to, he’s broken her heart. And that breaks his own. 

He has to do something, quickly, to make this right.

“Silly girl,” he murmurs. “We obviously weren’t fine.” He stands, to kiss her again, properly and more urgently this time, to convey his own desperation through the touch. 

“Yes we were,” she rebuts, so determined to be obstinate to the last. 

He laughs. She’s the loveliest thing he’s ever seen. “I love you.” He emphasizes each word. “Did you know that?”

She doesn’t respond, as though he’s shocked her into silence, and if anything, Laurie feels his grin grow wider.

“Because I do. I love you. I love your heart and your spirit. Your nose and your teeth and that fact that you continue to use that stupid lavender shampoo you insist is great, even though it sucks, because it was expensive and French. You can admit it; it’s bad at its job.”

“I knew you’d been using it,” she responds weakly. 

“I love your stubbornness and your inability to give up on something. That even though it makes you feel like shit right now, you will make me drive into the city so you can sit for hours in front of the same painting in a museum to just soak it in. I love that you’re willing to go to law school just to help your family. I love that you’re going to be a great lawyer. I even love you despite the fact that you refuse to admit pistachio gelato is good.” He points to the untouched, melting container on the counter with a grin. “ _You_ , Amy Curtis March.” 

“Oh.”

“Oh?” She enchants him. “Is that all you have to say?”

Tears peek out of the corners of her eyes when she meets his eyes, and it’s everything he can do to not sob himself. “Yes?”

He laughs, like this is all the most delightful thing, and gathers her into his arms to pull her close, captures her mouth with a solid kiss so he can leave her breathless. “I do. And I’m sorry that I ever made you doubt that. If I could go back and tell you every day for the last six months, I would.”

That catches her attention. “Six months?”

He realizes a moment later what he’s just admitted. “Yep.” He runs his hand through his hair. Nothing left here to do but be honest. No place to go but forward. “That last night in Paris, when you ripped me another new one. I realized I had to leave—I needed to do something to make you proud.” 

“I didn’t mean it like—” she protests.

“I know you didn’t,” he cuts off. He’d tried changing to make himself someone he thought Jo would want to be with, but the only thing that accomplished was turning him into someone he could never actually be, and ended with him realizing she hadn’t wanted that at all. With Amy… “But I realized I wanted to be worthy of you.” 

“Laurie…” She sounds stunned. 

“I don’t know if I ever will be, but I’m never going to stop wanting to make you proud.” He pulls back and looks her straight in the eye. “You’re not second best and you’re not a second choice, Amy.” He has never been so sure of anything else in his life. “You are the only one, and I will spend every second of the rest of my life proving it to you if that’s what it takes.”

“You don’t need to do that.” She takes a deep breath, and when she looks back at him, she looks more relaxed than before. “I—I believe you. And… I love you, too.”

Hearing her say it is a wonder. “Yeah?”

She’s laughing when she leans into him for another kiss. “Yeah.” 

Eventually, they come up for breath. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s fighting a grin. 

“You know, that was a pretty good speech.” She’s busy filing through the pantry for marshmallows and unopened packages of graham crackers. 

“You made me watch so many of those rom-coms,” he says, rummaging through a drawer for roasting skewers. “Something was bound to rub off on me.” 

She comes up behind him, threading her finger through his, and wrapping another arm around his waist. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. About Harvard.”

Laurie gives her fingers a squeeze. 

“It felt too much like something a girlfriend would do, and—I was trying so hard not to be that. Or to see you as my boyfriend.” He feels her breathe against him and turns around to look her in the eye when she steps back. She’s worrying her bottom lip between her teeth and her eyes are a little glassy. “You’ve always been Jo’s,” she says finally. “And I could ignore that in London, and Paris. But coming home, all of this,” she extends an arm out to indicate the expanse of what she means. “I’ve been in love with you for half my life, but it was always the two of you. I was afraid you’d come back and remember everything you felt for her, and realize I’m a poor substitute for Jo. So I decided, if I didn’t have you, I couldn’t lose you, and it would hurt less when you left.” 

“You’re not a poor—” He shakes his head, starts over. “You’re not a substitute for Jo. You. Amy. You’re… Everything.”

“I know.” She gives him a shy smile, one he’s never seen before, but which sends his heart bursting. He can hardly contain the joy in his chest. 

His mother had died when he was seven, leaving him to the care of a lost, grief-stricken father until he was fourteen, when the elder Laurence could no longer stand how much of his late, beloved wife lived on in their boy’s face, and sent him to his grandfather, half a world away. It had been a childhood unmoored and an adolescence adrift, until the March girls had swept into his life, built him a boat, and taught him to row. Meg, Beth, Jo, and Amy, with their castles in the sky and eyes full of dreams. Meg, who indulged; and Beth, who cherished; and Jo, who taunted; and Amy, who loved and loves and is loved.

They are—she is—his whole heart. 

“Half your life, huh?” 

She rolls her eyes at him, but fits her head under his chin and laughs. “Don’t be vain. I’d have loved the boy who saved my life, no matter who he was.”

“Even if it had been Ned Moffat?”

She laughs, a beautiful, ringing sound in his ear. “Maybe not Ned Moffat.” 

She turns serious. “I know you’ve probably been talking to her already about all of this, but I want to talk to Jo before we,” she shrugs. “Announce it to the world.”

Jo, he knows, will be happy for them. But it’s a good idea for the sisters to create their own new balance. Jo is never going to stop being his best friend, nor will Amy ever come second in his estimation again. There is a new equilibrium to be found, and the two sisters need to have it out on their own terms if any of this is going to sit right moving forward. “I’m pretty sure she was going to start wingmanning me if we didn’t figure it out soon.” 

“And there’s no way that could’ve backfired,” Amy responds, picking up the spoon and sliding it through the fifth, untouched pint of gelato. She wrinkles her nose when she tastes it and shakes her head. “Nope. I love you, but no.” 

He shakes his head in feigned dismay, but doesn’t say anything more. If he has any say in the matter, they’ve got a lifetime for her to figure that one out. 

She makes quick work of returning the various gelatos back to the freezer, picks up the s’mores accoutrements, and steps toward the back door to rejoin the festivities outside. 

He follows closely behind, a sundae in each hand for Daisy and Demi, and nearly bowls Amy over when she stops abruptly. 

When he looks down in question, he finds a small smirk playing at her lips. “You were totally jealous of Fred.”

He rolls his eyes affectionately, but doesn’t disagree. With a sigh, he concedes. “I was totally jealous of Fred.” 

———

She’d had inklings, of course, from the beautiful way he would look at her, but she had never allowed herself to actually think or hope it. It was easier to bear by preparing for the worst, than to hope for the outcome she couldn’t let herself want. When she’d first gone up to Laurie in London, well—who could blame a girl for living out a childhood fantasy, when she was so confident in the strength of her own iron will? And every day since then, she’d kept trying to convince herself that she was strong enough to face the music, when it ultimately came. 

When it came, though, it was an entirely different symphony than she expected. 

She wakes up in the morning warm and curled under his arm, his nose against her shoulder, and their legs tangled together. She hasn’t let herself wake up like this in weeks, not since his confession after the afternoon with the Vaughns, but thinks she wouldn’t mind waking up like this the rest of her life. 

In hindsight, it’s so clear that this was always going to be the result. That he loves her.

She can sense, more than anything else, when he wakes up, the cadence of his breathing kicking up a notch. “Morning.” It’s muffled against her skin where he presses a light kiss to her shoulder.

Amy shifts, turns toward him, and lets him press another kiss to her nose. It feels like those carefree mornings in Paris, but so much better, because they are—she is—so much more sure. “Morning,” she responds, and brings her lips to his in a slow, searching kiss. 

Everything about the morning is slow, quiet, unhurried.

She fits her body against the warmth and solidity of his, finds his hand and brings knuckles to her lips, finds her way down the length of him, takes him in one breath. Savors the sound caught in his throat, knows she put it there. Lets his touch bring her eyes level with his, thread their fingers together. Rejoices in the fit, the cant, the fullness of him within and against and around her. 

It is all slow, and careful, and worshipful. 

They have time—a lifetime, if she wants it—now, for such things. 

“You know,” she says between rinses of toothpaste from her mouth, looking at him brazenly in the mirror and through her lashes. “We won’t be able to do this once everyone knows.” 

Her parents aren’t prudes, by any measure, but they do have strong senses of propriety, and she can hazard a guess that they won’t be too keen on her sneaking out to spend the night with her boyfriend—boyfriend!—every night, once they know for sure that’s what’s been happening. 

“Probably not,” he agrees, eyes twinkling when he meets her gaze in the mirror. “But I’ll get to kiss you whenever I want, so it’s a fair trade. In any case…” He smirks, stepping closer to her, hands running greedily along the column of her spine, and then the bare skin of her shoulders. “You’ll be moving to Cambridge soon, and my grandfather stopped caring a long time ago if I sleep at home.” 

He wraps two arms around her before she can connect her elbow with his stomach, and is bodily moving her toward the steamy shower before she can remember to put her toothbrush down.

It hasn’t even been a day, and she already can’t imagine her life being anything else than this.

Jo is in the kitchen when Amy makes her way back home, after a breakfast of thick lattes and flakey pastries in town. She tosses a pain au chocolat at Jo’s head by way of greeting, and grabs a raspberry from her sister’s breakfast.

“You’re up early,” Amy says at the same time Jo dives right in with, “Teddy’s really grown into himself, hasn’t he?” 

Amy is noncommittal in her answer, giving Jo just a sidelong glance while picking at the remaining fruit on Jo’s plate. 

“Look, Jo—”

Her sister charges forward. “Now before you get upset, he asked me not to say anything, but I can’t stand it! You two are being idiots.”

“We are?”

“Yes,” Jo agrees. “You’re in love with Laurie.”

“Am I?” It’s hard to keep the amusement and sarcasm from her voice, wholly unsurprised as she is that her sister’s version of wingmanning is less subtle and delicate, and more like a bull with a mission in a china shop. 

“And he’s in love with you.”

“Is he?”

“Yes!” She can hear the impatience seeping into Jo’s voice, and it would be annoying if this weren’t so sweet. She listens to her sister’s monologue idly as she fixes another cup of coffee, and thinks Jo could go on for a while yet. Briefly, she considers pulling out some biscotti she knows they brought back from Eataly yesterday, but decides to do Jo a favor and save her sister’s breath instead. “Jo!” she exclaims with a laugh.

“And you’re driving him crazy with all this casual business. And I have no idea how you got into Harvard Law if you think you’re pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. You’ve never been good about sneaking out, Ames. The back door creaks, too.” 

“Jo!” she cries again.

“What?” Jo finally lifts her eyes to meet Amy’s. 

Amy pulls her sister into a hug.

“Augustus Snodgrass strikes again,” Amy laughs against Jo’s ear. “You always were great at spinning sensational stories.” 

“Explain.” 

Amy takes her time, relishing in her right as youngest sister to torture her sister this way, leisurely refilling Jo’s mug and carrying it with her to the backyard. She grabs some biscotti on her way out for good measure. Sitting, she tucks her legs under her and turns to Jo, who is looking at her through narrowed eyes. Barely able to contain her grin, Amy supposes she appears just as happy as she feels, but says nothing. 

Plopping down unceremoniously next to her, and taking a proferred biscotti, Jo turns to her and insists once more, “Explain.”

Amy takes a second to think. Where to begin with this story so that it will satisfy her sister, that it will make sense? 

She starts in May, with coming home once more, and everything that spiraled from there, and after some twists and turns, ends in London, where it all began. “I’ve wanted a little piece of him that was just mine all my life, and there he was.” She’s twirling her thumb around the rim of her mug as she says it. 

“Oh, Amy,” Jo sighs. “Even if he believed it for a while, Teddy was never mine. He’s never loved me like he loves you.” 

How quickly it becomes normal to know and have it be known, with so much confidence, that she is loved by Theodore Laurence. 

“I told him to ask me again, you know, to try dating? Right after you had gotten back. He refused to even consider it.” She gives Amy a broad, wry, and encouraging smile, pulls her into her chest and, despite Amy’s protests, gives her hair a ruffle. 

This is news to Amy, though she understands why Laurie didn’t tell her. Jo’s heart is her own, and Amy is thankful to her sister for sharing this part of it. In so many moments before, she has had to tamp down the younger Amy who grew up in Jo’s shadow, who was worried all it would take was one look from her sister to make Laurie realize what he was missing. She meant it last night when she said she didn’t need Laurie to prove what he feels for her anymore, but it’s still nice to know that he chose her so unequivocally. 

“I feel like I’ve broken the bro code or something. Betrayed the sisterhood.” 

Jo laughs, high and barking at the same time, ringing out above the birds. “I think you’ve done the sisterhood a favor.” She tilts her head thoughtfully, and the set of her mouth is serious. “Ames, honestly, I think I’d be more angry if you hadn’t done it. I’ve never seen him like this with anyone else. Don’t tell him I said this, but it’s really sweet. And Amy, you deserve the whole world. If Teddy’s the one who can be there with you, he’s the luckiest for it.”

All Amy can think to do is wrap her sister in another hug. Jo squeezes her tight. 

Pulling back slightly, Jo looks her straight in the eye. “You know we’ll always be okay, right? As long as you’re not making yourself small because of me?”

She has, for all her life, felt in the shadow of her second oldest sister. Jo, who fought with her the hardest, was also the one she wanted most to be like. Jo who was always so sure of who she was and what she wanted out of life—and who was fearless in her pursuit of her dreams. All her life, it was all Amy had wanted to be just like Jo, and she’d hated, by turns, that fact about herself and that she wasn’t succeeding. 

It’s taken twenty two years to fully realize, but Amy knows it now with acute, unassailable clarity. They are, none of them, in anybody’s shadow. This tight embrace of her sisters, of Jo, and Meg, and Beth, is the strength of her and the heart. She will hold on for dear life and carry them through wherever she may go, and she knows they do the same with her. 

———

The three of them decide to get out of the house and drive into the city while Beth and their parents are at the hospital, because there’s a Yayoi Kusama exhibition that’s just opened at the ICA that Amy is dying to see and there’s no use just twiddling their thumbs in Concord until Beth gets back. Laurie has somehow finagled three tickets for them, last minute, on a Friday afternoon, a week after the exhibition opened. While Amy is cooing delightedly, Jo remembers how far the Laurence name can take them here in Boston, and is glad, because it was his grandfather who was able to finagle Beth her appointment at Dana-Farber. 

She is glad for him—for the friend he has been to her, to her family, to her sisters, in every form that takes. 

Laurie rolls up the short drive between their two homes in a brand new Range Rover that surely cost him more than all her college tuition, grinning widely at the two March sisters. 

Jo thinks the car is absolutely ridiculous and says so, loudly and over and over again when he cuts the engine and jumps out with a flourish. 

Amy just raises an eyebrow. 

It was a birthday present from his grandfather, he explains with a shrug, who’s still stuck in London, but trying his best to get back home soon. 

“I can always get a different one,” he offers, mostly joking. “What would you have me drive?”

Jo begins to answer, but realizes quickly that he was talking to Amy, a soft and amused look on his face as he watches her sister. She’s not sure he realizes she’s there.

Amy rolls her eyes, puts on an affected air and British accent. “Oh, _my lord_ , you absolutely must keep it!” She circles the car appraisingly, stopping at the door in front of him and dropping the affect halfway through the next sentence. “How else will everyone know you’re the _world’s biggest asshole_?”

“You know what? Fuck you.” But Laurie is laughing too hard to really mean it and Amy is laughing too. 

Jo claims shotgun like she always does when Teddy drives, and barely misses the shrug Amy throws at him when she climbs in the back. Jo files that away for later. Things are _different_ now, what with the two of them being dining table official. Only their father had seemed genuinely surprised when the proverbial bomb had dropped at lunch on Sunday, to everyone else’s endless delight. Even old Mr. Laurence, when he’d called in via FaceTime for Teddy’s birthday, had seemed to mouth “Finally” at them all. 

Amy kicks off her shoes immediately and flings her legs across the entire second row, engrossed in her phone. 

During the thirty minute drive into the city, traffic patterns blessedly on their side, Jo fills the car with plans for upcoming short stories, responses from editors, and the trials that being a freelance writer chasing down accounting departments has put her through. By all accounts, Teddy is focused on their conversation, so it takes her by surprise when suddenly, he lifts his eyes to the rearview mirror, and bites out with a degree of arrogance, “I can afford it.” 

Amy doesn’t look up. “I know you can.” 

Teddy mutters something about tattoos and shoulders and, just like that, the moment is over. It’s an unguarded moment that speaks to how close they actually are—something that Amy has only recently begun to let herself reveal. Jo, softened in her old age, finds herself delighted by it. 

After nearly fifteen minutes wandering solo, looking for either of the people she arrived with, Jo finds Amy sitting on a bench in front of a small, moody watercolor. She sits down next to Amy, who doesn’t even notice, and feels a tap at her shoulder mere seconds later. Laurie tilts his head toward the door in invitation, and she follows. Quietly, with a small laugh, he looks back at Amy. “She’s going to be a while.” 

Jo is reminded of their youth, when Amy was their constant hanger-on, a third or a fifth wheel in Jo and Meg’s social lives, always wanting to do what her sisters did, always wanting to be there, be a part of it, to Jo’s endless chagrin. John and Teddy had found it endearing, and Meg had always had a soft spot for Amy, but Jo had only ever found it annoying when Amy tagged along. 

Now, it appears she is the hanger-on, Teddy and Amy apparently so accustomed to going to museums together that they have an unspoken routine they forget to tell Jo. 

She’s not used to being second, especially not with Teddy, and until she was actually confronted with the reality, she doesn’t think she could have ever truly wrapped her head around the idea. It is, admittedly, still a little weird. It will take time to get used to. 

But, intellectually, she’s always known this would happen someday, that Teddy would fall in love with someone else, bring her home, and make a life with her without Jo at the center. That the day would come when Jo March would fall from first priority in Theodore Laurence’s life. 

Intellectually, she’s always been okay with it—after all, she was the one who insisted this be the case. But she never spent too much time thinking about what it would be like to see Laurie truly in love with someone else. The only time she can ever remember Teddy being remotely in love with anyone was sophomore year of college when he was mooning—unbelievably loudly—over Cate Randal. It had been so ridiculous, so over the top, that she hadn’t paid it any mind. 

She’s never paid attention to it, because he’s never been serious before. 

When he is serious, it’s a sight to behold. 

She and Teddy have made their way through the entire museum and have been sitting in the café with a couple of glasses of wine for nearly an hour when Amy reappears in front of them, flushed and a little starry-eyed. Wordlessly, he hands Amy her own glass of rosé and presses a light kiss to the inside of her wrist. 

It’s a strikingly intimate moment, made all the more so by how casually it happens. He doesn’t even break the rhythm of their conversation. 

The affection, the bravado, the way Teddy looks at Amy that is so nakedly tender, they wrench in her heart (just a little, and only when she doesn’t find it sickening). 

In all the moments she thought about a future for Teddy, she certainly never thought that the person by his side would be Amy. At various points in their youth, Jo attempted pawning Laurie off on both Meg and Beth, so she can’t truthfully say that she’s never imagined Laurie as a brother-in-law. But it was never Amy. 

The age thing was true—Amy had been too young for Laurie up until very, very recently—but if Jo were to be honest with herself, it was also something of an excuse. 

She had never wanted Teddy for herself, but there was some part of her who hadn’t wanted him for Amy either. In the darkest corners of her mind, where her own worst impulses scared her, she thought he would be another thing that could’ve been Jo’s, but was better for Amy in the end. She remembers the tiny blonde wisp, supercilious and stubborn, that her sister used to be, and thinks it was because she and Amy were always set in relief to each other—always, in a competition of their own making—that there’d been a time when she hadn’t wanted this to happen.

There was some part of her that knew that, perhaps, if the two of them figured it out, it would be perfect.

That part of her would’ve been right.

She’s watched Amy grow sweet and tender in the last few years, a young woman who carries herself with poise and self-assurance. Amy as a child let vanity and a desire for grandiosity lead her forward into misguided scrapes. Amy in adulthood is gracious and kind and so sure of her own way. The confidence and the calm look well on her. 

And Teddy, without her even knowing it, has gained a seriousness, a level-headedness, and a responsibility, to bear the twin gift and burden of his birthright with equanimity and good humor, all while maintaining the joy and light-heartedness he has always had. 

Amy, poised and self-assured, makes a fine partner for the young Mr. Laurence, who often has to dress a part and please society matrons. Teddy, in turn, is the fine patrician they always expected Amy to find, but his kindness and heart soften the sharp blade of Amy’s practical and cunning eye. So too are they perfect complements to each other’s dreamier side, happy as they are in their bare feet against the floor of a muddy wood, or singing at the top of their lungs to bad music, or planning months long sojourns through Tuscany. 

Watching them now, Jo knows, if she could’ve saved them each the heartache of the last eight months, she would’ve given Laurie to Amy, bequeathed him with full magnanimity. But Laurie’s heart had never hers to give, and he’s made his own choice anyway. 

Jo knows Laurie had loved each of her sisters, not merely tolerating them for her sake, but loved them as individuals, even if it had, until recently, always been in relation to her and their friendship. Jo also knows Amy harbored a crush for their tall, handsome boy next door for years. For years, it had been annoying, but now she’s glad for it—for what can and will come of it. 

She’s only ever wanted the world for both of them, these two pieces of her heart, and she’s glad they can go take it on together.

* * *

**later** —

He drops the heavy box into her lap unceremoniously, where it lands corner-first against her unprotected ankle. 

“Ow, Teddy! What the hell?” 

He just looks at her expectantly, two eyebrows raised, gesturing significantly toward the object. Only then does she take stock of what, exactly, he has proffered. She picks the red leather box up and cracks it open, finding three diamonds winking up at her, even in the dim firelight of the living room. “Oh, Teddy.” 

“It was my grandmother’s.” He’s got a hand tucked in either of his back pockets and is shuffling a little against the rug. 

Teddy goes to Amy first, now, for everything. They are the partners in crime now, with their sly looks across the room and inside jokes that she isn’t privy to. There is a part of her that misses the Teddy that was only hers, but it’s the same part of her that longs for being twelve, having no earthly responsibilities, and thinking the entire world and cosmos were at her command. 

This new reality—she wouldn’t have it any other way. Her Teddy and her Amy, two pieces of her heart, building their life together. Even still, it heartens Jo to know there is one thing that she gets to know first. 

“It’s beautiful,” she declares, handing the ring in its box back to Teddy. “She’s going to love it.”

“You think so?”

“Of course.” She looks up at him with a smile and is caught by the unadulterated, unguarded peace on his face. “When are you going to ask her?”

“Tomorrow. Before breakfast.” He can barely keep the grin off his face and Jo finds that it’s infectious, her own face split wide by her joy. And if they both find that they’re a little teary when she reaches around his shoulders to hug him, then so be it. 

Christmas morning breakfast was a big affair in the March home when there were four little girls who loved Santa and sweets and their parents crowding the big Douglas fir by the fireplace. It’s no different now that they’re all grown up and the children voraciously unwrapping presents bear the name Brook, not March. 

Even if it will always be sobering to remember that there used to be one more stocking on the staircase, the big oak table still groans under the weight of a ham for twenty, the air still smells like cider and fresh-baked cookies, and the twinkle of the piano’s notes still rise above their laughter. They still find joy and love and music in this house just the way Beth would have wanted them to. 

Daisy, Demi, and Josie have made a mess of the living room and are growing restless for their breakfast when Amy and Laurie come through the front door, their cheeks pink and eyes shining. Gloveless, Amy wouldn’t be able to hide her new accessory even if the joy wasn’t so palpable on their faces.

Meg, who is the first to spot the difference, exclaims in delight, clambering over empty boxes and ripped wrapping paper to get a closer look. The rest of the family turns toward the commotion. Instead of making a verbal announcement, Amy just lifts her left hand while Laurie stands there, his arm around his fiancée’s waist, looking proud. 

It’s a ruckus, the entire family passing Amy and Laurie between them for hugs and congratulations, and becomes pandemonium when Mr. Laurence pops the cork off a bottle he’s been saving for years, and John begins passing around mugs full of champagne.

Jo wraps her arms tight around Laurie’s neck. “You’ve always been part of our family, Teddy, but I’m glad we get to make it official anyway.” 

Jo had said, only half jokingly, as they were getting ready for Meg’s wedding, that she would have married Meg if it meant keeping them all together. So many years later, she knows better now. Family isn’t diminished by change or loss, and love—in all its forms—is infinite and infinitely mutable, but never disappears. 

She releases him only to extend an arm toward Amy, who steps into her sister’s embrace and lets Laurie sling an arm around either of them.

“Theodore March does have a nice ring to it.”


End file.
